Three reasons why you may experience this warning message during a recalculation
If you’re developing a new Deltek Cobra project or making changes to an existing one, you may see the following warnings appear in the log file when you run a recalculation.
“[Warning] No rate found for MECHENG, rate set MECHENG on or before 12/01/2011”
This can happen for a number of reasons. This article outlines what these reasons can be and should help you narrow the problem down to a solution.
Reason 1
The date for the rate may indeed be set to a time later than when the project wants to use the rate. If you have a resource assigned in the project to start work on January 2012, but the earliest date in the rate set is December 2012, you will get this message.
Solution: check the rate set’s date in the rate file and modify it to a date before the first usage of the resource.
However, I have encountered this warning many times when I can clearly see that the rate set date is well before the first use of the resource: yet the message persists. What’s up with that?
Here are some other “gotchas” that can cause this warning and they are harder to track down. They generally occur after making changes to the current rate file or when you change it out for a modified rate file.
Reason 2
Leading or trailing spaces in the resource name.
I’ve blogged about this one before. It can happen when you’ve been loading your rates from a CSV file created in Excel. Excel can place spaces before or after elements in the file when it’s being saved to a CSV file. When these are read in to Deltek Cobra, you won’t see spaces in the rate file dialogs. Using an underscore to illustrate this, here’s what happens.
The resource that appears as ‘Engineer’ in the Rate dialog, may in fact be “_Engineer” or “Engineer_”. Either way, it won’t work when Cobra tries to calculate a rate for Engineer. It correctly reports ‘No rate found for Engineer’. The only way to find out if this is the case is to export the rate file using the “Export Rates” report in the All Reports tab. Then save it as a CSV file and examine it in Notepad to some other text editor to see if there are any unwanted spaces.
Reason 3
If none of the above is true, there’s one more place to check for a solution: and this one could have you kicking yourself.
If you changed out the rate file, did you remember to tell the classes?
When you change the rate file for a project, you do so by going to the Project Information dialog and selecting the new rate file using the ‘Rate:’ field in the Files tab. In this example we are changing DEMORAT for DEMORAT2.
What is commonly forgotten however is that you may need to also change the value set for each of the classes used by the project if the rate file was specified in the Rate File field of the selected class.
In the above example, the Rate File field was set. This is how you can use different rate files for different classes. However, if it was left blank, the class will use the Project Rate File and you will not be experiencing the warnings. So, check the Rate File field and make sure it’s either blank or is set to the new rate file for each of the classes in the project.